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tips & tricks

GNOME is one of the more stable and user-friendly desktops around. And of course, like most of the Linux-verse, with a little tweaking you can make it even more user-friendly. The GNOME panel is one aspect of the GNOME desktop that certainly does not escape possible tweaks.

Since I discovered just how great KDE 4 is a couple of months ago, I've been using it full-time and am loving it. In all that time, I've discovered a few tips and tricks that I couldn't live without, and all of them are listed here. Some of these include an inline CLI, split folders, setting up a media keyboard and using advanced wallpapers.

In this article, I'm going to show you a number of simple, yet highly useful tricks that will make your scripting life easier. True, this article may appeal to the more geeky segment of my readers, but there's no reason to stop reading.

I use the Linux command line extensively, both on my local machine or when I’m connected to a remote server. There are some keyboard shortcuts that I want to share with you which have made my life on BASH a lot easier. I have not come across too many books that have documented these shortcuts and I think they are quite important to improve your productivity while on the command line.

I carry a small, laminated card indicating my subscription to the IUSP (International Union of the Super Paranoid, tin hat division). Well, you can't be too careful. After all, we live in a dangerous world and computers are just an extension of that.

If you manage to freeze your system in such a way that even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn’t work anymore, the mouse is stuck on the screen any none of the key combinations will work, don’t think of the reset button just yet.

Although using public key authentication instead of passwords is a great method for increasing the security of SSH transfers, transferring SSH identity keys can be a royal pain. First, you create your key pairs; then, you copy the public key into the correct locations on all the machines you want to log into.

A lot of software users I meet seem to feel they are not using their software as efficiently as they could. If that includes you, then listen up. Here is my list of the ten, lesser-known, OpenOffice.org Writer keyboard shortcuts that will help you improve your productivity.

This month's collection of tips&tricks from FSM:
* How to spring-clean an Apt-based distro
* How to fix broken Firefox extensions
* How to edit your GRUB settings with QGRUBEditor
* How to make Jabber calls using Jabbin

Linux is a powerful operating system, but chances are it's a very different operating system than any you've used before. The dizzying number of choices in distributions alone is enough to make your head spin, but it also means there's something out there that really suits your computing style.

One of the primary strengths of Firefox is its extensions. Sure if they aren't programmed well they can end up draining memory from your system and such, but they can still be rather useful. Here are a few extensions that I consider to help my productivity greatly.

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions, and I wonder how many of you made the resolution to waste less time browsing the internet? If so, here's an easy way to track the amount of time you spend online.